Radio, sound communication by radio waves, usually through the transmission of music, news, and other types of programs from single broadcast stations to multitudes of individual listeners equipped with radio receivers. From its birth early in the 20th century, broadcast radio astonished and delighted the public by providing news and entertainment with an immediacy never before thought possible. From about 1920 to 1945, radio developed into the first electronic mass medium, monopolizing “the airwaves” and defining, along with newspapers, magazines, and motion pictures, an entire generation of mass culture. About 1945 the appearance of television began to transform radio’s content and role. Broadcast radio remained the most widely available electronic mass medium in the world, though its importance in modern life did not match that of television, and in the early 21st century it faced yet more competitive pressure from digital satellite- and Internet-based audio services.

A disc jockey delivering the Sirius Satellite Radio service’s first live broadcast, from the Rock …

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A family gathered around a radio console, 1930s.

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Listen: radio: Barry Alldis introducing his Top 20 show on Radio Luxembourg

Barry Alldis introducing his Top 20 show on Radio Luxembourg.

Based on the human voice, radio is a uniquely personal medium, invoking a listener’s imagination to fill in mental images around the broadcast sounds. More readily and in a more widespread fashion than any other medium, radio can soothe listeners with comforting dialogue or background music, or it can jar them back into reality with polemics and breaking news. Radio also can employ a boundless plethora of sound and music effects to entertain and enthrall listeners. Since the birth of this medium, commercial broadcast companies as well as government organs have made conscious use of its unique attributes to create programs that attract and hold listeners’ attention. The history of radio programming and broadcasting around the world is explored in this article.

Radio’s early years

The first voice and music signals heard over radio waves were transmitted in December 1906 from Brant Rock, Massachusetts (just south of Boston), when Canadian experimenter Reginald Fessenden produced about an hour of talk and music for technical observers and any radio amateurs who might be listening. Many other one-off experiments took place in the next few years, but none led to continuing scheduled services. On the West Coast of the United States, for example, Charles (“Doc”) Herrold began operating a wireless transmitter in conjunction with his radio school in San Jose, California, about 1908. Herrold was soon providing regularly scheduled voice and music programs to a small local audience of amateur radio operators in what may have been the first such continuing service in the world.

Reginald Fessenden (right) and coworkers in their radio station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, …

Courtesy of the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina

The radio hobby grew during the decade before World War I, and the ability to “listen in” with earphones (as there were no loudspeakers) and occasionally hear voices and music seemed almost magical. Nevertheless, very few people heard these early broadcasts—most people merely heard about them—in part because the only available receivers were those handmade by radio enthusiasts, the majority of them men and boys. Among these early receivers were crystal sets, which used a tiny piece of galena (lead sulfide) called a “cat’s whisker” to detect radio signals. Although popular, inexpensive, and easy to make, crystal sets were a challenge to tune in to a station. Such experiments were scattered, and so there was little demand for manufactured receivers. (Plug-in radio receivers, which, through the use of loudspeakers, allowed for radio to become a “communal experience,” would not become widespread until after 1927.) Early broadcasters in the United States, such as Herrold, would continue until early 1917, when federal government restrictions forced most radio transmitters off the air for the rest of World War I, stalling the growth of the medium.

After the war, renewed interest in radio broadcasts grew out of experimenters’ efforts, though such broadcasts were neither officially authorized nor licensed by government agencies, as would become the practice in most countries by the late 1920s. Early unauthorized broadcasts sometimes angered government officials, as in England, where concern was raised over interference with official government and military signals. Amateurs developed the means and simply began to broadcast, sometimes preannounced but often not. As they became more proficient, they would announce schedules—typically an hour or so for one or two evenings per week.

One of the world’s first scheduled radio broadcast services (known as PCGG) began in Rotterdam, Netherlands, on November 6, 1919. Other early Dutch stations were operated by the Amsterdam Stock Exchange (to send information to new members) and by a news agency that was seeking a new way to serve newspaper subscribers. Another early station appeared in Canada when station XWA (now CFCF) in Montreal began transmitting experimentally in September 1919 and on a regular schedule the next year. (The first commercially sponsored stations in Canada appeared in 1922.) The first British station offered two daily half-hour programs of talk and music from Chelmsford (near London) in 1919–20. Concerns about interference with military wireless transmissions, however, led to a shutdown until 1922, when government-authorized stations appeared, including the first London-based outlet. The first Mexican radio station aired in the capital city in 1921, though many in the country had first heard broadcasts from Cuba or Puerto Rico. By that point, stations had also appeared in Australia (Melbourne, in 1921), New Zealand (from Otago University in Dunedin, also in 1921), and Denmark (from Copenhagen, 1923).

Broadcasting got an important boost in the huge American market when about 30 radio stations took to the air in different cities in 1920–21. Most of these developed out of amateur operations, each dedicated to a different purpose. “Doc” Herrold returned to the air in 1921, but he soon had to sell his station for lack of operating funds. The University of Wisconsin’s WHA began as a physics department transmitter, but as early as 1917 it was sending wireless telegraph agricultural market reports by Morse Code to Wisconsin farmers. WHA, the first American educational outlet, probably began voice broadcasts in early 1921, though several other universities soon initiated stations with similar aims. KDKA in Pittsburgh, most often cited as the first radio outlet in the United States, had begun as the amateur station 8XK in 1916, but it was forced off the air in World War I. It reappeared on November 2, 1920, as a “commercial” voice-and-music service operated by the Westinghouse electrical manufacturer to help sell the company’s radio receivers. Westinghouse added other stations in different cities over the next two years, and General Electric and the newly formed Radio Corporation of America (RCA) soon entered the radio business as well. Detroit’s amateur operation 8MK (which debuted on August 20, 1920) soon became WWJ, the first station to be owned by a newspaper (The Detroit News). Initially seen as simply another press-supported community service, a radio station became a means of hedging bets in case the new medium proved competitive with newspapers.

Interior of the KDKA “radio shack,” constructed atop the Westinghouse building in …

Slowly, other American stations took to the air, often as auxiliaries to the owner’s primary business, such as a retail store, hotel, or record shop. The deluge came in 1922 when more than 550 new stations crowded onto the few available frequencies to build on radio’s appeal across the country. Many quickly disappeared as they could not pay the cost of operations (on-air advertising was rare). Equipment was largely hand-built, and most stations operated with less power than an ordinary reading lamp. Initial studio spaces had walls covered in burlap to deaden sound and, along with a microphone, featured a piano that could be used for filling short bits of air time. A few stations experimented with telephone lines to allow two or more outlets to carry (or “network”) an occasional presidential address or sporting event. Audiences were enthralled as radio became a national craze. Magazines, books, and even movies featured or included references to radio broadcasting.

Most other industrial nations began radio broadcasts by the mid-1920s. France (in Paris) and the Soviet Union (in Moscow) aired broadcasts in 1922. The first continuing Chinese radio station appeared in Shanghai early in 1923, when stations also appeared in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Spain. The pace quickened when Italy explored radio in 1924, followed by Japan, Mexico, Norway, and Poland in 1925. All these countries varied in how they authorized and organized radio services, with governments usually playing a far more central role than was the case in the United States.

Stations everywhere faced the same basic problem: what to program in order to attract and hold an audience—and how to support a continuing service financially. Radio quickly became popular anywhere signals could be heard, but how best to utilize the medium—what to place on the air, or to “program”—remained to be seen. Most early broadcasts were characterized by haphazardness, though two attractions quickly stood out: the warmth of the human voice (at first nearly always male) and almost any type of music, classical or popular, instrumental or vocal. Virtually everything on the air was live because recordings were of poor quality. Thus, a speaker or a musician could easily fill time until the next segment appeared. Only after the first few years did the notion of “programs” develop, with specific times and lengths, beginnings and endings.

The Golden Age of American radio

The Golden Age of American radio as a creative medium lasted, at best, from 1930 to 1955, with the true peak period being the 1940s. Writer-producer-director Norman Corwin, one of radio’s brightest talents, ruefully made the point that radio’s most creative era was “the shortest golden age in history.” During its brief heyday, however, dramatic radio thrived and was a vital part of American culture. As would become true with television in later decades, frequently used expressions from popular programs became part of the vernacular, and people arranged their personal schedules, as they later did with television, around their favourite programs.

Kate Smith performing with studio musicians for a radio broadcast, 1946.

A new commercial medium

The need for regulation

In the United States, active broadcasting preceded firm government policy. Indeed, as radio became more and more of a business, station owners banded together to seek stronger government licensing regulation. From 1922 to 1925, Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce and in charge of radio policy, convened four national conferences, each of which petitioned Congress to replace the only existing (and obsolete) laws regarding broadcasting, which had been established in 1912 to regulate ship-to-shore transmissions.

Initially all stations in the United States had to operate on a single frequency, 833 kilohertz (kHz), and stations in the same area were forced to share time so their signals did not interfere with each another. The addition of two more frequencies, 619 kHz in December 1921 and 750 kHz in August 1922, helped somewhat, but most larger cities had far more than three stations and thus continued to use shared-time arrangements. At Hoover’s behest, most frequencies between 550 kHz and 1,350 kHz were turned over for broadcast use in May 1923. The Department of Commerce, however, lacked the discretion to reject license applications or to enforce frequency assignments. Considerable interference resulted as operators shifted station frequency (and sometimes the transmitter location, by mounting it in a truck) in an attempt to obtain a clear signal.

This lack of self-regulation and mutual cooperation between station operators resulted in increased pressure on Congress to update radio legislation, which was accomplished with the landmark Radio Act of 1927. This act provided basic assumptions that have continued to underpin broadcasting policy in the United States to this day. Frequencies used for broadcasting were to be held by the government, not owned by licensees. A license would be issued only if “the public interest, convenience or necessity” was served. A new Federal Radio Commission established by the law would define what “the public interest” meant, though broadcasters would be held responsible for the content they provided.

The role of advertising

Sale of advertising time was not widely practiced at early radio stations in the United States. Indeed, many objected to the commercialization of radio, among them Herbert Hoover, who said in 1924, “I believe the quickest way to kill broadcasting would be to use it for direct advertising.” Strong arguments were made opposing the “invasion of people’s homes with commerce” (although newspapers and magazines had done so for more than a century) on the grounds that it would lead to entertainment programs pitched to the mass audience, thereby limiting radio’s potential educational and social benefits. Searching for operating funds, stations sought government support, gifts from the wealthy, voluntary contributions, or an annual fee assessed on listeners (the latter an approach already adopted in some countries). A few cities or states operated stations as government services.

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) brought advertising to American radio when their New York City radio station, WEAF, began selling time for “toll broadcasting.” Its first radio commercial, broadcast on August 22, 1922, was a 15-minute real-estate ad offering apartments in Jackson Heights, Queens. But acceptance of radio advertising was slow, as broadcasters did not want to offend listeners. Early ads promoted an institutional image in a style later common to public radio’s “underwriting” announcements.

Nevertheless, by the end of the 1920s, radio was firmly established as an advertising medium, which in turn led to air time’s being sold in set blocks, determined by the length of the program. As radio developed, daytime shows such as soap operas and children’s programs generally ran 15 minutes. Dramatic shows and situation comedies, the bulk of prime-time programming, ran 30 minutes each. Hour-long blocks of time were generally reserved for prestigious big-star shows, such as Lux Radio Theatre, or for low-rated but esteemed and experimental shows, such as The Columbia Workshop.

Many advertisers made themselves known by eventually adopting the practice of combining their name with the name of the star or the title of the program, as with Camel Caravan, sponsored by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, or A&P Gypsies, sponsored by the largest American grocery-store chain at the time. Beginning in the 1930s and continuing for more than two decades, a majority of prime-time network programs were actually created by advertising agencies employed by sponsors. For example, during Bing Crosby’s tenure as host of The Kraft Music Hall, the talent and staff were hired by the Kraft food company’s advertising firm, the J. Walter Thompson agency. The networks merely provided the airtime and studio facilities. Some of the more creative radio talents functioned as their own producers, receiving a budget from the agency out of which they paid the supporting actors and crew. Even these artists were under strict supervision of the agencies, which usually had representatives present during the rehearsals and broadcast.

The development of networks and production centres

A fundamental shift in American broadcasting came with the realization by the late 1920s that individual stations could easily share the cost of providing programs as a part of a broader network service with national appeal. The first such network was the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), primarily organized by the general manager of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), David Sarnoff, who wanted the company not only to manufacture radios but to broadcast as well. On November 15, 1926, NBC made its debut over 19 stations extending from the East Coast to Kansas City, Missouri. Over flagship station WEAF in New York City, announcer Graham McNamee presided over the inaugural broadcast; guest stars included humourist Will Rogers, speaking from Independence, Kansas, and opera star Mary Garden, singing from Chicago. A new era in radio dawned with this broadcast. Earlier radio stations had a limited sphere of influence, but these “clear channel” stations, operating at 50,000 watts on a frequency unique to their outlet, could be heard across a significant part of the country, and so some early radio personalities gained a measure of regional or national fame. Nationally known radio stars began to exist after the advent of the networks. By the beginning of 1927, NBC had two networks, the Red and the Blue, which totaled 25 stations; more would join.

Listen: “Amos ’n’ Andy”: 1928 episode

A 1928 episode of the radio show Amos ’n’ Andy, featuring the comedic …

The most popular early network series by far was NBC’s Amos ’n’ Andy, a daily 15-minute situation comedy in which two white men (Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll) acted the parts of two black operators of a taxicab company in Chicago. The program began as Sam ’n’ Henry on Chicago’s WGN station in 1926 and quickly became a national phenomenon when it made its network debut under its new name in 1929. Although the characters on the show seem insultingly stereotypical by today’s standards, the show was hugely popular with both white and black radio audiences of the time, with theatres often having to interrupt movie showings and push a radio on to the stage for the evening broadcast.

Early in 1927, a competing network called United Independent Broadcasters was formed. An early investor in the network was the Columbia Phonograph Company, which insisted that the chain be called the Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System. However, the record company soon sold its shares to a group of financiers that included Leon Levy, whose father-in-law was cigar magnate Sam Paley; before long, Paley’s son William decided to invest his own million-dollar fortune in the new network. William S. Paley became president of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) on September 25, 1928, two days before his 27th birthday, and he would lead the network for more than 60 years. CBS would soon become a major force in radio, although it would take years before it would challenge NBC’s supremacy.

In the late 1930s the Federal Communications Commission (created by the Communications Act of 1934) investigated the potential for a monopoly on broadcasting, and in 1941 it recommended that no single company own more than one network. As a result, NBC decided to sell its Blue network in 1943. The chain was purchased by Edward J. Noble, president of the Life Savers candy company. By 1944 it had been renamed the American Broadcasting Company (ABC).

In the earliest years of network radio’s heyday, most of the evening programs were produced and broadcast from New York City. Chicago also soon developed into a major centre of radio production, transmitting many of the daytime soap operas and afternoon shows for children. Detroit’s WXYZ became a major force in 1933 with popular shows such as The Lone Ranger. In 1934 WXYZ joined with the powerful 50,000-watt stations WLW in Cincinnati, WOR in New York, and WGN in Chicago to form the Quality Group, an association that was soon rechristened the Mutual Broadcasting System. The network had 19 stations by the end of 1935; by the mid-1940s Mutual had more than 300 stations, more affiliates than either of its rivals. Mutual did not own any of its affiliated stations, however, whereas NBC and CBS each owned and operated several stations.

In radio’s earliest days, Hollywood did not provide network programming, with rare exceptions. Networks used telephone lines to transmit their signals to affiliates, and because they were designed to be broadcast from the East Coast to the West, AT&T charged $1,000 an hour to reverse the circuits. Powerful gossip columnist Louella Parsons—whose show, Hollywood Hotel, debuted on CBS in October 1934—surmounted this fee by inducing top film stars to appear on her program for free. The success of this show established Hollywood as a major centre of radio production.

By the start of the 1940s, most of the best-known radio shows came from Hollywood. New York still had a bustling radio community, but the Chicago shows began moving to one coast or the other. Detroit’s WXYZ remained a world unto itself, producing popular adventure shows through the early 1950s. Smaller regionally based networks also existed during the 1930s and ’40s, such as the Boston-based Yankee Network, which ultimately became a pioneer in FM, or frequency-modulation, broadcasting. (Virtually all broadcasts during radio’s peak years were in AM, or amplitude modulation.)

Ratings systems

As radio grew into a commercial force, it became necessary to determine the popularity of particular shows, as this would affect the price of the program’s advertising time. In 1930 the Association of National Advertisers, along with the Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting, devised a ratings system called the Crossley Report, for which several thousand people were polled by telephone and asked to recall the programs to which they had been listening. A refinement of this was created by another company, C.E. Hooper. The firm would make random telephone calls to people who lived in 36 major cities. Those who answered were then asked to name the radio program to which they were currently listening, if any. The tally resulted in an estimate of the number of people listening to a particular show; a rating of 14.2 meant that out of 100 people called, 14.2 were listening to a particular program at the time of the call. Along with this “Hooperating,” as it was then known, the audience share of a given program was listed; this was the rating divided by all the sets then being used. Another firm that measured audience response was the A.C. Nielsen Co., which provided thousands of listeners with a mechanical device called an audiometer. On paper tape, a stylus would scratch a signal showing which station a radio was tuned to during every moment that it was in use.

A new art form

The techniques of radio drama had long been established with commercial phonograph recordings called “descriptive specialties,” in which sound effects created an environment, vocal qualities created characterizations, and distance from the recording device indicated the performers’ relative placement. Just as audiences of the time were accustomed to seeing motion pictures without sound, they learned how to envision their own images to accompany purely audible dramas. By enlisting the support of the listener’s imagination, Golden Age radio combined dialogue, sound effects, music, and occasional narration to paint images with sound. As a result, the best radio writers were those who thought visually and those who could create their visions through purely aural means.

Radio acting

During the 1930s a group of dependable actors and actresses developed who worked primarily in radio. These performers were skilled in vocally portraying many different dialects and age ranges. Frequently, one actor would play two or more roles in a given program. An actor who “doubled” in this manner needed the ability to switch mental gears and make the transition from one voice to the next. A radio actor did not have to resemble a part physically. A versatile actor would generally appear on many programs, and he or she could devise imaginative ways to get quickly from one studio to another when performing in consecutive programs on different stations. Some performers, Orson Welles among them, occasionally hired an ambulance to speed them to the next studio.

Some radio programs were produced in studios in which only technicians and performers were present; others were enacted before a live audience. In the very early days of network radio, audiences witnessing a broadcast were admonished not to make any noise, as it was felt that this would confuse the listeners at home. Comedian Eddie Cantor needed laughter and applause, however, and early in his tenure (September 1931 to November 1934) as host of The Chase and Sanborn Hour for NBC, he did everything he could to make the crowd laugh heartily while on the air. The sound of the audience’s laughter proved infectious, and Cantor’s approach won out. From then on, most comedy and variety shows depended on the live audience’s reaction as an essential ingredient.

Because radio actors were not required to memorize lines, rehearsals were brief and informal. On the day of the broadcast, actors would sit around a table and read the script aloud; after one or two of these “table readings,” a dress rehearsal that included music and sound effects directly preceded the program, which was then performed live on the air. The best and busiest radio actors often performed on the air with no rehearsal at all, reading the script “cold” yet still conveying a well-defined characterization.

Time zone differences required many shows to be broadcast live twice: once for the East Coast and again for the West three hours later. Radio lore is filled with stories of actors who spent their three-hour break having a few drinks at Brittingham’s, a restaurant next to CBS studios in Hollywood, or at Colby’s, the New York equivalent—and then performing the West Coast show in a rather uninhibited fashion.

Sound effects

As dramatic radio developed, so did a need for convincing sound effects. Some effects established the background of a scene; a story taking place in the woods at night might have crickets chirping, an owl hooting, and a coyote howling, for example. Some effects were achieved with a library of special recordings. For some scenes a radio sound-effects crew could employ a battery of turntables playing many recorded effects simultaneously. Other effects were done vocally; certain performers specialized in reproducing baby cries, animal sounds, or blood-curdling screams.

Many of the dynamic sound effects were achieved with props, often built by the sound-effects specialists themselves. Thunder was simulated by shaking a large sheet of metal; galloping horses were reenacted by pounding coconut half shells in a sandbox; and the crunch of footsteps in the snow was created with bags full of cornstarch. Specially designed boxes were created to reproduce the sounds of telephones and doors. Sound engineers kept a large supply of shoes and various floor surfaces on hand to reproduce the sounds of footsteps.

Radio music

As radio’s narrative form developed, so did unique musical passages designed to help further a story. Musical bridges were used as a transition between scenes and might indicate a change in mood from comedic to dramatic. “Stings” were musical cues that came in sharply and dramatically, often played just after an actor had delivered a line indicating a new turn in the story line. Many radio shows also had distinctive theme songs; some of them became indelibly associated with particular performers.

The musicians used on a given program could range from a single organist to a full orchestra. CBS had a particularly fine group of composers and conductors. Among the CBS staff were conductors Mark Warnow, Raymond Scott (renowned for the quirky pseudo-jazz pieces he performed with his Quintette), and Lud Gluskin. Composers included Lyn Murray and Bernard Herrmann; the latter went from composing scores for radio shows such as Columbia Workshop and The Mercury Theatre on the Air to creating renowned scores for films directed by Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and many others.

Golden Age programming

Origins in vaudeville

Much of the programming in the early period of American radio sounded like the popular vaudeville theatre circuit from whence came many of radio’s early personalities. Announcers were often selected not merely for their voice quality but for their ability to play the piano or some other instrument in order to fill unexpected gaps in programs. Because few stations could afford to pay performers, early programs centred on what was available, such as a professor holding forth on a current issue, a visiting singing star, or a local band. Music was predominant, occupying two-thirds to three-quarters of most stations’ slowly expanding airtime. Virtually all other time was given over to some kind of talk or information content. Rare were stations such as Westinghouse’s KYW in Chicago, which specialized in a specific format—in this case, live broadcasts of opera.

The typical broadcast day, therefore, consisted of irregular times devoted to talk, music, or comedy in a largely unplanned fashion, each lasting for however long seemed “right.” Early commercial radio broadcasting was more akin to a small-scale “mom-and-pop” operation than to a smooth-running corporate enterprise. Throughout commercial radio’s first decade (the 1920s), the broadcast day was often filled with anyone who was available. The pioneer broadcasters were the first people called upon to provide entertainment and information for a substantial amount of the day and evening; as a result, just about anything audible that was remotely interesting would be trotted before the microphones in the 1920s. Gale Gordon, later a popular supporting actor on many radio shows of the 1940s, recalled making his debut over the air on KFWB in 1926:

There was a studio at the base of a tower on Sunset Boulevard; it was Warner Bros. Studios. It had a little room at the bottom where they broadcast radio, which was quite a novelty in those days. And somebody told me, “If you have anything to say or do, go in and they’ll be happy to put you on the air.”…So I went down, and they said, “What do you do?” I’d learned three or four chords on the ukulele, and I’d written some new words to “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’,” which was a silly popular song of that time, and so they said, “The mike is yours.” So I went on and sang “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’” with these four lousy chords—I cannot play anything—and they said thank you, and I left. Nobody ever heard it, I’m sure, because they only had 50 listeners in the best of times. (Gale Gordon, personal communication)

Although Gordon’s experience seems to have come straight out of small-town America, in fact it took place in Hollywood.

The development of planned schedules featuring popular programs of specific lengths, defined formats, and clear beginnings and endings developed slowly in the United States and elsewhere through the 1920s. Until about 1930, however, radio offered little or no drama or situation comedy, few sports broadcasts of any kind, and no regular newscasts or weather reports.

Comedy

Among radio’s most popular and enduring shows were comedy programs. Many of the medium’s early comedians had learned their trade in vaudeville. The regimen of performing before several different audiences each day sharpened their timing, a skill that was invaluable for radio. Early comedy programs seemed like vaudeville shows. Ed Wynn, who appeared as “The Fire Chief” for Texaco gasoline from 1932 to 1935, simply stood on a stage and told jokes, with announcer Graham McNamee as his straight man. As the medium matured, however, many comedians adopted the narrative techniques of dramatic radio, either performing some sort of sketch during the show or changing the format of the entire program into a narrative-style show.

George Burns and Gracie Allen at the CBS microphone.

Bettmann/Corbis

A case in point is Jack Benny’s program, which debuted in 1932. It evolved during the 1940s from a revue—with Benny and his guests exchanging banter and then performing a sketch with that week’s guest star—into a narrative show, often taking place at Benny’s house. Benny, with his writers, used sound more imaginatively than any other comedian. As his friend George Burns noted in a 1972 documentary:

Jack Benny made use of pauses and waits. Like Jack going over to Ronald Colman’s house to borrow a cup of sugar. Well, when Jack Benny goes to Ronald Colman’s house, he goes there. He goes down eight steps, and he walks on the sidewalk, and he’s carrying the cup, and after that a man passes him and drops 10 cents in the cup, and you hear the 10 cents drop and Jack says “Thank you,” then he walks again, and walks up eights steps, rings the bell—there was no hurry with Jack; he knew how to use those waits and how to use radio. (The Great Radio Comedians, produced by Perry Miller Adato for the Public Broadcasting System)

Other noted comedians attained early success in radio. Fred Allen, a great wit and noted ad-libber, delivered his stinging barbs in an immediately recognizable nasal New England drawl. He began his long-running radio tenure in 1932 after a career on the vaudeville stage, and his popular program remained on the air through 1949. Allen is best remembered for his mock feud with Jack Benny (“Is Benny going bald? Benny’s head looks as though his neck is blowing bubble gum!”) and for his visits with residents of “Allen’s Alley,” characters who gave their perspectives on popular questions of the day.

Listen: “Bob Hope Show, The”

The Bob Hope Show, starring Bob Hope and featuring Les Brown and His Band of …

Bob Hope also gained training in vaudeville and in Broadway shows, and in 1935 he began working on radio. In 1938 he began hosting The Pepsodent Show Starring Bob Hope, which became one of radio’s most popular shows and ran for more than a decade. Hope’s machine-gun delivery of topical jokes was something new in radio; he was bolstered by supporting players such as the outlandish “Professor” Jerry Colonna. On May 6, 1941, Hope did his first remote broadcast from March Field near Riverside, California, and found the audience of servicemen so wildly responsive that a typical studio audience seemed tepid by comparison. During the next seven years all but two of his shows were broadcast from army camps, naval bases, and service hospitals around the world.

Comedian Bob Hope reading from a script into a radio microphone, 1940s.

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George Burns and Gracie Allen were two other vaudeville veterans who had their greatest success in radio. Burns had been in show business from age seven, though without much success until he met Allen in 1922. Gracie came from a show business family and was a singer, dancer, and dramatic actress. Their fortunes increased steadily, and on January 27, 1926, they became partners in marriage as well as comedy. Their unique humour was based on Gracie’s “illogical logic.” Her responses to George (the team’s head writer) made perfect sense but only to her, as seen in an example from one of their vaudeville routines:

George: You know, you’re too smart for one girl.

Gracie: I’m more than one.

George: You’re more than one?

Gracie: My mother has a picture of me when I was two.

By February 1932 they were regulars on bandleader Guy Lombardo’s radio show for CBS, and two years later they had their own program, which would continue until 1950. After that, Burns and Allen had a popular television show that ran until Gracie retired in 1958.

Another great comedy team of radio was unique in that its appeal was supposed to be primarily visual, though the “team” was really one man. Edgar Bergen was a ventriloquist with a dummy (or alter-ego) named Charlie McCarthy, whose wisecracking manner was in strict contrast to Bergen’s genteel, fatherly personality. Rudy Vallee saw their act in December 1936 and decided to put them on his show, despite the incongruity of a ventriloquist on radio. Charlie’s personality captivated the audience, and by May 9, 1937, Bergen and McCarthy were the new stars of the prestigious variety show The Chase and Sanborn Hour. Bergen remained on radio through 1956.

Edgar Bergen with his ventriloquist’s dummy Charlie McCarthy.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Other prominent comics who attained success on radio included Red Skelton, noted for his elastic voice and talent for creating memorable characters. His radio show began in 1941 and continued through 1952, the year after he began a two-decade run on television—a medium in which audiences discovered his great gifts for pantomime and physical comedy. Eddie Cantor was a Broadway headliner when he began starring on radio in September 1931. Cantor’s trademark large eyes were lost on the listening audience, but his boundless energy, his amusingly egotistical personality, and his way with bouncy songs such as “If You Knew Susie” wore well for years, and he remained on radio until 1954. Another favourite of Broadway and nightclub audiences, Jimmy Durante, became newly popular when he was teamed in 1943 with young comic Garry Moore. Gravel-voiced Durante, known for his malapropisms, and the suave Moore, whose wit was dry and whimsical, were a study in contrasts. Moore left the show in 1947, but Durante remained a top star in radio and continued in television through the early 1970s.

Situation comedy

The situation comedy format, which became a mainstay of radio (and of television to the present day), developed during the 1930s. As opposed to the “revue” format of early radio comedy, the situation comedy is a narrative form. It has a consistent locale and group of characters, and although the story of each episode is usually complete in itself, certain elements will carry over from one week to the next. Some of the earliest examples, including Amos ’n’ Andy and Lum and Abner, had continuing story lines, in the manner of daily soap operas. Most were half-hour shows that ran once a week in prime time—the hours between 7 and 10 pm, when most people had the leisure time for radio.

Radio performers Freeman Gosden (left) and Charles Correll (right) reading a script for their …

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Listen: “Vic and Sade”

“Bacon Sandwiches,” an episode of the radio show Vic and …

The typical situation comedy revolved around the misadventures of a family. For example, Vic and Sade, which debuted on June 29, 1932, depicted the strange yet recognizable events in the lives of Victor Gook and his wife, Sade, who lived in “the small house halfway up the next block,” in small-town Illinois. Although the show had a sparse cast, the listener became familiar with a variety of colourful characters, thanks to the vivid descriptions recounted by the four principals in dialogue written by the program’s creator, Paul Rhymer, who wrote every episode of the show from its debut until its demise on September 19, 1946. The poet Edgar Lee Masters said that Vic and Sade “presented the best American humour of its day,” and Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt was reportedly an admirer of the series.

If other situation comedies of the 1930s and ’40s did not quite attain Vic and Sade’s level of quality, there was still great fun to be heard in Easy Aces, a very witty domestic show written by Goodman Ace that featured his affectionate battles with his dizzy wife, Jane. Another fine domestic show was Ethel and Albert, written by and starring Peg Lynch. Toward the end of radio’s Golden Age, Lucille Ball starred in My Favorite Husband (the title character was played by Richard Denning), a program that provided the basis for her remarkably successful television series, I Love Lucy. The Life of Riley, starring William Bendix as a well-meaning if somewhat overprotective husband and father, was a long-running success in both radio and television, as was The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which starred former bandleader Ozzie Nelson, his real-life wife, Harriet Hilliard Nelson, and, eventually, their two sons, David and Ricky.

One of the most durable situation comedies was Fibber McGee and Molly. This show starred Jim and Marian Jordan, a married couple from Peoria, Illinois, who had been singers in vaudeville and worked in a variety of Chicago-based radio series until “becoming” the McGees in 1935. The character of Fibber never sought steady employment, working instead on a variety of get-rich-quick schemes. The show is also remembered for what was perhaps radio’s best-known “visual,” that of the cascading cacophony of junk that would pour forth from Fibber’s hall closet.

Variety shows

The variety program, a combination of comedy and music that almost always included a singing host and a guest star for the week, also dominated the period. Frequently, a comedy sketch would be included among the proceedings. The earliest examples of the form often featured a popular dance orchestra. For example, The Goodrich Silvertown Orchestra, named after its sponsor’s tires, was an hour-long program for NBC from 1926 to 1928, and it featured “the Silver-Masked Tenor,” a singer whose identity was kept secret. The real architect of the variety show was singer-saxophonist-bandleader Rudy Vallee, who starred in The Fleischmann Yeast Hour for a decade on NBC, beginning on October 24, 1929. The wavy-haired heartthrob not only crooned and provided dance music but also bantered with guest stars and introduced a lengthy dramatic sketch on each program.

Singer Al Jolson, self-billed as “the World’s Greatest Entertainer,” appeared on several variety series from 1932 through 1939, but he did not find his greatest radio success until he took over as host of The Kraft Music Hall from October 1947 through May 1949. That series, however, is indelibly associated with Bing Crosby, who hosted it for a decade beginning in 1936. Crosby had already become a top star of recordings and had made several successful movies, but his weekly visits into America’s homes via radio made him the nation’s most beloved entertainer. Crosby’s manner was easygoing yet elegant. He proved to be a fine light comedian, and he had a fondness for unusual and alliterative words which was further developed by his head writer, Carroll Carroll. After a dispute with the Kraft people (Crosby wanted to record his shows instead of doing them live), Crosby hosted successful shows for Philco radios, Chesterfield cigarettes, and General Electric until departing the medium in 1956. Many other popular singers hosted variety shows, among them Kate Smith, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, and Dick Haymes.

Anthology shows

Radio’s anthology shows featured casts and story lines that were entirely different from one week to the next. These shows provided a forum for some of radio’s brightest talents, whose abilities were too great to be confined to the more formulaic programs. Chief among them were Orson Welles and Norman Corwin.

By 1937 Welles was one of the busiest radio actors and was also creating a sensation on Broadway with his Mercury Theatre troupe. He was a regular performer on The March of Time and had the weekly starring role of The Shadow. His success in theatre led CBS to offer Welles an hour-long timeslot for a weekly show: The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Welles’s partner, John Houseman, wrote the scripts, and the Mercury company supplied the voices. Welles generally played several parts per show and sought innovative new ways of storytelling and directing.

Welles became a household name with a landmark broadcast of October 30, 1938: an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s fantasy story The War of the Worlds, about an invasion from Mars. Welles had decided to recast the story (originally set in England) as a contemporary American event, told over the air in news bulletins. The program was clearly announced as a dramatization at its outset. Many listeners, however, tuned in midway to what they thought was a succession of actual news bulletins. Affiliate stations began reporting the panicked reactions of listeners, which started in New Jersey (where writer Howard Koch had placed the start of the “invasion”) and spread to the rest of the nation. CBS executive Davidson Taylor ordered announcer Dan Seymour to state immediately that the broadcast was a work of fiction, but it was too little, too late. By the time Welles signed off by jovially likening this Halloween offering as “The Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying ‘boo,’ ” police were ready to storm the studio. Although it was feared that there had been many suicides or deaths in stampedes, there were no fatalities caused by the broadcast.

Corwin was perhaps the most creative and versatile talent in the history of radio. His programs were broadcast on a sustaining basis by CBS and were treated as prestige items. Corwin, a gentle man with a fierce intellect, wrote stories ranging from low comedy to high drama and from gentle whimsy to stark reality. The only constants were the intelligence of the writing, the creativity of the direction, and the impact of the finished shows. Such was his range that CBS gave him carte blanche to create whatever programs he wished; the resulting series, Twenty-six by Corwin (May–November 1941) and Columbia Presents Corwin (1944–45), remain towering achievements in radio. So too was his special broadcast commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, We Hold These Truths, and one marking V-E Day, On a Note of Triumph.

Film-based anthology shows

From the mid-1920s producers of motion pictures saw radio as a natural vehicle for advertising their product. In March 1925 the Warner Brothers studio set up its own radio station, KFWB, in Los Angeles as a means to promote its films and stars; other studios soon followed this example.

A radio version of The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart, Sidney …

Radio’s relationship with the movies intensified with the premiere of The Lux Radio Theatre in 1934. By 1936 the program was hosted by Paramount’s famous director-producer Cecil B. DeMille. From this point on, almost all the stories used on Lux were drawn from movies, and most of the shows employed the stars who had appeared in the films. The writers of the Lux show quickly learned how to condense a movie running 90 minutes or longer into about 40 minutes of air time (the other 20 minutes being taken up with Lux soap commercials, DeMille’s introduction, and a closing chat with the guest stars). The Lux show soon became so popular that it inspired a number of imitators, including The Warner Brothers Academy Theater, The Screen Guild Theater, Academy Award Theater, Screen Director’s Playhouse, The MGM Theater of the Air, and many others.

Police and detective dramas

Listen: Calling All Cars: “Cookie Vejar Killing” episode

“Cookie Vejar Killing,” a 1933 episode of the radio show Calling …

The police drama made its debut on radio with Calling All Cars, which was broadcast from November 1933 to September 1939 over the West Coast stations of CBS. The series was written and directed by William N. Robson, who would later become one of radio’s most renowned talents, and depicted actual crime stories, which were introduced by members of the Los Angeles Police Department. A final wrap-up related the fate met by the criminals at the hands of the legal system.

Listen: Gangbusters

“The Death Mask Killer,” a 1946 episode of the radio show …

By June 1935 producer-writer-director Phillips H. Lord had conceived a series based on the exploits of FBI agents. His new show went on the air as G-Men, but, as FBI head J. Edgar Hoover showed increasing disapproval of the series, the show was revamped as Gangbusters. Like Calling All Cars, it used real events as the basis for its scripts. The program’s opening—an ear-splitting montage of police whistles, marching feet, breaking glass, machine-gun fire, sirens, and screeching tires—was so distinctive that it inspired the slang phrase “coming on like Gangbusters.”

The true-to-life police drama genre had new life breathed into it with Dragnet, which debuted on June 3, 1949, over NBC. The brainchild of a young writer-director-actor named Jack Webb, Dragnet employed essentially the same format as Calling All Cars, but it was much more realistic, focusing on the day-to-day, tedious grind of catching crooks. Webb starred as Sgt. Joe Friday, a bachelor cop whose grim determination to ferret out the bad guys made the tedium of the job bearable. The show had a stylized realism, with trademark musical bridges, extremely realistic sound effects, Webb’s flat-voiced narration, a staccato “stinger” line at the end of each scene, a tag sequence telling how the legal system dealt with the criminal, and, above all, the ominous theme music (“Dum-de-DUM-dum!”) written by Walter Schumann.

The fictitious detective was also well represented on radio. The Shadow began over CBS in July 1930 as an anthology series of unrelated crime dramas, with the title character serving merely as host. The series in its best-remembered form—with wealthy man-about-town Lamont Cranston using strange powers of hypnosis to become the Shadow, rendering himself invisible to criminals—began in September 1937, airing over the Mutual network and starring a 22-year-old Orson Welles.

Westerns

Listen: “Death Valley Days”

“Sam Bass,” a 1936 episode of the radio show Death Valley …

Radio’s first western drama appears to have been Death Valley Days, which first aired on September 30, 1930, over NBC’s Red network. The series came about when the Pacific Borax Company wanted to sponsor a dramatic show about the Old West (which fit in with the “20 Mule Team” trademark of its cleaning product). The narrator was the “Old Ranger,” who had known the cowboys, prospectors, gamblers, miners, and villains who populated the stories. The series was immediately popular and ran through September 1951. It transferred to television and had a lengthy run in that medium as well.

Two long-running western series aimed primarily at children debuted in 1933: The Lone Ranger, which was first broadcast from Detroit’s WXYZ on January 31, and The Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooters, which first aired over NBC on September 25. Both series would last into the early 1950s.

The Lone Ranger, the masked man who rode a great white horse named Silver and fought crime, accompanied by his “faithful Indian companion,” Tonto, remains an essential part of American folklore. The series was not always a prime example of radio storytelling at its best; much of its action was conveyed by a narrator (most memorably, Fred Foy) rather than through dialogue and sound effects. It was lively and colourful, however, and it remained popular in syndicated reruns.

Listen: “Hopalong Cassidy”: “Death Crosses the River”

“Death Crosses the River,” an episode of the radio show Hopalong …

Listen: “Tales of the Texas Rangers”

An episode of the radio show Tales of the Texas Rangers featuring …

Singing cowboys of the movies translated well to radio, as proved by the long-running series Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch (January 1940–May 1956) and The Roy Rogers Show (November 1944–July 1955). Another movie cowboy, Buck Jones, had the syndicated series Hoofbeats in 1937, and William Boyd gave Hopalong Cassidy a radio run from 1948 to 1952. During the 1950s, with westerns dominating television, a flurry of “adult westerns” appeared on radio as well. Among them were Hawk Larabee (which began life as Hawk Durango in 1946) and Tales of the Texas Rangers, starring Joel McCrea, in 1950.

Listen: “Stage Holdup”

“Stage Holdup,” a 1954 episode of the radio show Gunsmoke.

The most influential adult western, Gunsmoke, did for the western what Dragnet had done for the police drama by eschewing cartoonish characters and substituting the grit, grime, and blood of the Old West. The cast was headed by William Conrad, whose deep rumbling voice gave the character of U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon an instant authority and an air of tragedy. Producer-director Norman MacDonnell and head writer John Meston gave the show a realistic quality never heard before: the sound-effects team caught every nuance, making the listener see the worn wooden boardwalk and taste the dust of Dodge City. Gunsmoke was violent yet compassionate, grim yet often warmly funny. Arriving at the end of radio’s Golden Age (airing from April 26, 1952, to June 18, 1961), Gunsmoke was one of the medium’s finest programs.

Horror and suspense

The horror genre was very effective on radio because of the gruesome and frightening images that could be suggested by purely aural means. One of the earliest radio horrors was The Witch’s Tale, which debuted in May 1931 over WOR in New York and ran on the Mutual network starting in 1934. In that same year Lights Out, a true milestone in radio horror, was launched by producer-director Wyllis Cooper; in 1936 Cooper accepted a Hollywood screenwriting job and left the series to writer-director Arch Oboler. The show (which frequently aired at midnight so as not to be heard by the young and impressionable) became radio’s ultimate gore fest, filled with various grisly dismemberments accomplished by imaginative sound effects. Oboler tried to make some important points about society’s mores in his stories, balancing the gory with allegory.

A blend of the ghoulish and the murder mystery came with producer Himan Brown’sInner Sanctum Mysteries (January 1941–October 1952), which almost always involved a murder and some supernatural element. An ironic finish was virtually a given; for example, in “Elixer Number Four,” an episode from 1945, a character played by Richard Widmark murders a scientist who has created a serum that gives immortality, only to be sentenced to prison for life. Weird characters abounded, their antics punctuated by the most uninhibited pipe-organ “stings” in the history of radio. The show’s best-remembered trademark was the ominous squeaking, creaking door that opened each episode and slammed shut at the episode’s conclusion.

Suspense (June 1942–September 1962) was certainly the longest-running horror-oriented show, as well as the most star-studded. As hinted by its title, the program was more suspenseful than horrific, and it was almost always rooted in contemporary everyday reality. The series’s best-remembered story, frequently reprised, was “Sorry, Wrong Number, ” actress Agnes Moorehead’s tour-de-force portrayal of a bedridden woman who accidentally overhears a murder plot on her telephone, unaware that she is the intended victim. Despite shrinking budgets during its last years, Suspense continued to deliver first-rate programs until the final day of the series—and of network dramatic radio—on September 30, 1962.

Science fiction

Listen: Flash Gordon: "On the Planet Mongo," a 1935 radio episode

“On the Planet Mongo,” a 1935 episode of the radio show Flash …

Listen: “X Minus One”

“The Seventh Victim,” written by Robert Scheckley, an episode of the radio show …

Toward the end of radio’s Golden Age, science fiction found a more mature voice than had prevailed on such earlier juvenile shows as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (November 1932–May 1936) and Flash Gordon (April–October 1935). Dimension X (April 1950–September 1951) had some remarkable sound effects, and it featured radio adaptations of stories by the likes of Ray Bradbury. The series was the springboard for the later X Minus One (April 1955–January 1958), which featured “stories of the future, adventures in which you’ll live in a million could-be years on a thousand may-be worlds.” Bradbury’s stories were again featured in this series, as were those by such writers as Robert Bloch and Isaac Asimov.

Soap operas

Soap operas—so named because many of them were sponsored by detergent companies—were 15-minute serial dramas that aired each weekday. These were open-ended stories: as one conflict seemed to be resolved, another sprang up, keeping the listener interested for weeks, years, or even decades. The form developed in Chicago radio. In 1926 Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll proved that a program told in serial form could succeed with their show Sam ’n’ Henry. Once the show evolved into Amos ’n’ Andy in 1928, the approach worked on a national level as well.

Three main creative forces dominated the soap opera world. Irna Phillips, a former teacher from Dayton, Ohio, began writing and starring in Painted Dreams for Chicago’s WGN in 1930. After a dispute with that station, she revamped her show in 1933 and sold it to NBC as Today’s Children. Soon she created another fine program, the first of several series that revolved around characters with inherently dramatic occupations. The Guiding Light, which debuted over NBC in January 1937, was originally about a minister and his family, and it stands as the longest-running soap opera in history, broadcasting on both radio and television from 1952 to 1956 and finally airing its last television episode in September 2009. Phillips also created several other shows, as well as many of the trademarks that extended to soap operas in general. She found that the organ was the perfect musical accompaniment and that it worked well for transitions from one scene to the next. She developed cliffhanger endings that brought listeners back every day, but she also realized that interesting characters would keep them returning for years.

The husband-wife team of Frank and Anne Hummert was one of the most prolific creative forces in radio; eventually, they produced more than 60 series. One of their early shows, Betty and Bob (NBC-Blue, October 1932), involving “just plain folks” caught up in extraordinary circumstances, became the archetype for many future series, including Just Plain Bill, The Romance of Helen Trent, Ma Perkins, Backstage Wife, Lorenzo Jones, and Stella Dallas. The Hummerts ruled their empire from their home in Greenwich, Connecticut, creating the basic story outlines and characterizations for their many shows; these were then fleshed out by six editors and 20 staff writers.

The third major creative force in radio soap operas was playwright and short-story author Elaine Sterne Carrington. Her shows tended to be more subtle, gentle, and family-oriented than other soaps on the air, which were rife with heartbreak, amnesia victims, and the occasional murder trial. Carrington’s main work began life as Red Adams and eventually was transformed into Pepper’s Young Family, a domestic drama that ran in varied formats from 1932 to 1959. Her two other long-running programs were When a Girl Marries (1939–57) and Rosemary (1944–55).

Many other daytime serial dramas, created by other hands, graced the airwaves between 1933 and 1960. At the genre’s height there were more than 200 radio soaps.

Juvenile action and adventure series

The first radio shows for children were heard only on local stations, such as Uncle Wip, which was on Philadelphia’s WIP in 1921. The best-known host of this kind of show was Uncle Don Carney, who became a radio institution with his show from New York’s WOR (a 50,000-watt station that could be heard in seven states). His ad-libbed program of conversation and nonsense songs began in 1928 and ran until 1949.

Network radio programs geared especially for young listeners began with The Adventures of Helen and Mary, which debuted over CBS in September 1929. In 1934 the series was given an overhauling and a new title, Let’s Pretend, under which it continued until 1954. A half-hour show broadcast on Saturdays, Let’s Pretend featured well-known fairy tales, dramatized by an all-juvenile cast.

Late-afternoon serial adventures for youngsters began with Little Orphan Annie, first broadcast over WGN radio in Chicago in 1930. Annie was first a comic strip, created in 1924 by Harold Gray for the Chicago Tribune, which owned WGN. The radio series graduated to NBC-Blue in April 1931. The show’s format set the standard for juvenile adventure serials, running for 15 minutes each weekday, with an open-ended story line that featured Annie vanquishing a procession of gangsters, spies, and pirates in a variety of far-flung locales. Annie’s longtime radio sponsor was Ovaltine, a malt-based milk flavouring, and the program thus inaugurated two other traditions: the long commercial and the premium that listeners could obtain by mail for a nominal fee and a remnant of the product’s packaging.

Comic strips such as Annie provided the basis for many long-running radio adventure serials. They had a preexisting base of fans, and radio show and newspaper strip helped promote each other. Dick Tracy, Superman, Terry and the Pirates, Jungle Jim, Don Winslow of the Navy, and Mandrake the Magician were among the comic characters who came to radio during the 1930s and ’40s.

Listen: “Captain Midnight”

An episode of the radio show Captain Midnight.

Captain Midnight began in October 1939 as a regional series; it transferred to the Mutual network in September 1940 and remained on the air through December 1949. Midnight was actually Captain Red Albright, a former World War I flyer and commander of the flying Secret Squadron, who was dedicated to stopping the fiendish Ivan Shark, who wanted to take over the world. During World War II, the focus changed from rooting out Ivan Shark to defeating the Nazis and the Japanese.

One of the most popular daytime action adventure shows was Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, produced by the Hummerts and sponsored by Wheaties cereal. It made its debut on July 31, 1933. Jack was the star athlete and hero of Hudson High School; his adventures took him to exotic locales around the world.

A show that owed much to the juvenile serial drama format and that began as a weekday afternoon show although it soon moved to prime time, was I Love a Mystery, considered by many to be the ultimate radio action-adventure series. The brainchild of Carlton E. Morse, its heroes were Jack Packard, head of the A-1 Detective Agency, and his partners, Doc Long, a hard-fighting, hard-living Texan, and Reggie Yorke, whose seeming British reserve concealed an eagerness for a good brawl. Together they traveled the world and found blood-curdling terror, mysterious women, and hidden danger.

Sports

Sports coverage on radio began on April 11, 1921, when KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcast the first live sporting event: a boxing match described by local newspaper reporter Florent Gibson. The first live baseball game was a Pittsburgh Pirates–Philadelphia Phillies game covered by announcer Harold Arlin and broadcast by KDKA on August 5, 1921. Football and tennis had been broadcast by 1922; by the fall of that year, football was regularly scheduled on New York’s WEAF. Graham McNamee, a cub announcer, was soon called upon by WEAF to broadcast several sporting events, including championship fights and the World Series starting in 1923. McNamee became NBC’s top sports announcer, presiding over football, baseball, and boxing. He infused his sportscasts with human interest and drama and became the first important play-by-play man.

Graham McNamee of radio station WEAF broadcasting a baseball game from the 1924 World Series at …

Library of Congress

Ted Husing became CBS’s answer to McNamee. He had a beautifully smooth voice, with a tone that he had achieved in part by intentionally having his nose broken and reset. Husing’s polar opposite in vocal quality was gravel-voiced Clem McCarthy, whose main interest was horse racing. McCarthy frequently covered the Kentucky Derby, memorably calling the victories of Seabiscuit and Whirlaway. McCarthy covered boxing as well, a highlight being his passionate description of Joe Louis’s victory over Max Schmeling in 1938. Also popular was Bill Stern, who from 1937 to 1956 had a 15-minute show that offered breathless and often fabricated accounts of amazing events in the lives of sports greats; Stern tried to cover himself by noting that the stories were “some real, some hearsay.”

Throughout the years, baseball and football games began to be transmitted regularly within their local markets by sportscasters, who became the official voices of their teams. Many of them developed highly personal styles with trademark phrases, such as Mel Allen’s “How about that!” after a Yankee hit a home run. Red Barber began calling Brooklyn Dodgers games for New York’s WHN in 1939, and his folksy but literate style was a revelation. Much of Barber’s style was carried on in television well into the 21st century by his onetime broadcasting partner, Vin Scully.

Mel Allen, c. 1955.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

News

News was certainly a part of radio’s heyday; one of the first landmark broadcasts was on November 2, 1920, when KDKA in Pittsburgh signed on—from a makeshift studio in a garage—and an announcer read the returns of the presidential race between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox. The range of the 100-watt station was unknown at the time, and listeners to KDKA were asked to send in postcards if they were able to hear the broadcast. (A few thousand people may have tuned in.) By 1928 CBS and NBC were providing full live coverage direct from the Democratic and Republican conventions. When both networks presented live coverage of Herbert Hoover’s inauguration, they received a huge response from listeners.

Walter Winchell

Bettmann/Corbis

Clearly, the public wanted more news on radio. Radio could broadcast news as it happened, which newspapers could not do. By the late 1920s the newspaper industry saw broadcasting as a distinct threat and imposed restrictions on radio stations that were using the same wire services that supplied the print media; stories were not to be broadcast until they had already appeared in newspapers. As a result, the national networks began building their own news-gathering services.

Listen: Roosevelt, Franklin D.

U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, delivering his First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933.

As news became an integral part of each broadcast day, several commentators and newsmen became well known. H.V. Kaltenborn was one of the earliest radio commentators, making his radio series debut in 1922; he became known for his instant and lucid analyses of news events as they happened. His ability to translate several languages made him especially valuable as tensions rose in Europe in the 1930s. Lowell Thomas, a globe-trotting adventurer, brought his experience to radio in 1930 and continued delivering his daily 15-minute newscasts through May 1976. Thomas’s broadcasts were free of any personal bias; this could not be said of Walter Winchell, who breathlessly rattled off a combination of news and show-business gossip, much of it vitriolic, punctuated by the dots and dashes of a telegraph key.

American radio goes to war

Network radio news truly came of age during World War II. Edward R. Murrow had been hired by CBS in 1935 for a public relations job, and he was asked in 1937 to go to London to produce educational programs. Murrow hired reporter William L. Shirer to help him cover European news—and soon there was plenty of it. On March 12, 1938, Murrow (in Vienna) and Shirer (in London) covered Hitler’s annexation of Austria. Murrow went back to London and built a first-class team of reporters, including Howard K. Smith, Charles Collingwood, Larry Lesueur, and Eric Sevareid. They sent frequent broadcasts by shortwave from Berlin, Paris, and other European cities to New York. Murrow covered the effects of the Nazi bombing raids on the British capital; his opening line “This…is London,” became a well-known signature. By the coming of war to the United States on December 7, 1941, all the networks had increased the amount of air time devoted to news and had built impressive teams of correspondents worldwide.

American radio also expanded internationally during this period. There was no U.S. government international radio voice prior to the war. Lacking shortwave receivers, most Americans were unaware of the developing radio war. After American entry into the war, however, the government’s Office of War Information took control of the private shortwave operations and initiated the Voice of America (VOA) network, which began operating in early 1942 from a handful of transmitters, including some borrowed from the BBC. VOA sought from the start to provide a radio window into American news, public affairs, and culture.

The most star-studded programs in the history of radio also occurred during the war years, although they were never heard by most of the listening audience. These were programs produced by the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS), a wartime unit that broadcast on shortwave and sent recorded transcriptions of the shows to low-powered radio stations at outposts around the world. The AFRS also sent specially edited versions of popular network shows that had already been broadcast. Its homegrown product was written by top radio scribes and featured the greatest entertainers in the medium, all of them donating their services to the war effort. The main AFRS series were Command Performance and Mail Call, variety shows with a heavy emphasis on music and comedy that were virtually interchangeable. Among the most celebrated Command Performance shows was Dick Tracy in B-flat, a special hour-long musical spoof of the comic strip performed on February 5, 1945, and featuring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, Jimmy Durante, the Andrews Sisters, Judy Garland, Jerry Colonna, Harry von Zell, Frank Morgan, and Cass Daley—a cast that would have broken the budget of any network variety series. Also important was Jubilee, which ran from 1942 to 1953 and was directed at African American soldiers. The show was hosted by comedian Ernest (“Bubbles”) Whitman and featured such entertainers as Lena Horne, Nat “King” Cole, and Count Basie.

American Forces Radio and Television Service/U.S. Department of Defense

The end of American radio’s Golden Age

Although experimental mechanical television broadcasts had begun in 1925, the economic effects of the Great Depression and the demands of World War II put the development of electronic television on hold, thus extending the era of radio’s dominance. When American network television finally made its first inroads in 1948, radio was in a vulnerable position. Many shows had been on the air for a decade or more. Much of what was on radio in 1948 seemed, if not stale, then very familiar. Television was soon offering exciting new stars such as comedians Milton Berle and Sid Caesar. Furthermore, after Bing Crosby began prerecording his Philco Radio Time show in October 1946, other programs followed suit; instead of being aired live, more and more programs were transcribed. As a result, prime-time radio soon lost much of its immediacy. When programs went out live, the listener knew that an announcer could make a “blooper” (say an unintended or forbidden word), an actor might miss a cue, a sound effect might not work—anything could happen. With the onset of transcribed shows, the listener knew that little unseemly would happen, because all the mistakes had been edited out. Thus, radio became less spontaneous and less exciting.

Red Skelton playing Freddie the Freeloader, a recurring character from his television variety …

CBS Photo Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

During the early 1950s many radio stars attempted the transition to television; some met with success, while others were resounding failures. Jack Benny and the team of Burns and Allen learned how to adapt to the visual medium, but Fred Allen found that television eliminated his ability to stimulate his audience’s imagination. After departing radio in 1953, Red Skelton showed his new television audiences that he was even more talented as a physical comedian than as a verbal one.

Listen: “Father Knows Best”

“Too Many Problems,” a 1950 episode of the radio show Father …

Some situation comedies, such as Father Knows Best and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, became even bigger successes on television than they had been on radio, but others disappeared quickly. Some series were revamped for television: Gunsmoke became a long-running success on TV, but it had an entirely different cast from the radio version, and it lost much of its grit and tension in the transition. Dragnet fared better creatively; Jack Webb looked the part of detective Joe Friday, and he created a hard-bitten visual style as unique as the radio show’s aural one.

As audiences dwindled and sponsors disappeared, network radio shows had to operate on ever-decreasing budgets. Live orchestras were scrapped in favour of recorded music; fewer actors were used on a given program; and some shows went from a once-a-week, 30-minute format to a smaller-scale show, running each weekday for 15 minutes. Many of the big-time comedy shows, including the programs of Eddie Cantor, Rudy Vallee, and Amos ’n’ Andy, became little more than standard disc-jockey fare.

Although many long-established programs left the air in the early 1950s, radio still offered occasional excellent programs in the Golden Age tradition. Paul Harvey began his 15-minute reports in November 1950, and his distinctive delivery was still being heard regularly over ABC until his death in 2009, serving as one of the few 21st-century links to radio’s Golden Age. Other outstanding programs included the science-fiction anthology X Minus One (1955–58), the Stan Freberg comedy series of 1957, old dependables such as Gunsmoke and Suspense, and experimental fare such as CBS Radio Workshop, which ran from January 1956 through September 1957.

Daytime soap operas had been as tenacious as their heroines, but even they were jettisoned from radio when CBS canceled the last seven remaining shows in November 1960. The final remnants of radio’s Golden Age were the horror show Suspense and the crime drama Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, which aired their last broadcasts over CBS on September 30, 1962.